AD-COM


	Internationalization is the process of preparing your product for cost-effective localization. The process includes the designing, implementing and planning of a product so that it is neutral, both culturally and technically, and can easily be localized for a specific target market, regardless of culture. Internationalization will reduce your cost and time-to-market by identifying aesthetic, cultural, linguistic and technical issues at the beginning of the project. After the process is completed, you will have a base from which to create multiple language versions of your product. Internationalization will get your product to the global market faster and cheaper because it only needs to done ONCE to be effective.

	How We Do It For the process to be effective, internationalized products must be easy to localize, maintain, and update. That's why the core of any internationalization project is determining which parts need to be changed and which parts do not. AD-COM will help you through each step of the internationalization process with tools, processes, professional project management and linguistic expertise. Once the internationalized plan is in place, development for multiple countries and cultures will be more cost-efficient, timely and market-effective.
	How We Help We will execute an in-depth analysis of your internationalization project. We will prepare a written project specification. We will develop an entire plan (including design, development, documentation and content). We will provide reliable, seamless follow-up to ensure that the project is successfully implemented.
	Some of the items that we will address while internationalizing your product are: Creating content that has global meaning. Leaving enough space so that text can be inserted regardless of the length demands of each language—the length of text often increases when translated from English to other languages. Developing illustrations where the text can easily be exchanged between languages while allowing for specific space demands for each language. Separating language elements from graphic elements, and extracting content from software or Web applications. Using tools that support international character sets (including Unicode), because some products do not support foreign languages. Asian languages, for example, use ideographs in addition to alphabetical systems. We ensure that content written to support characters in single byte are double-byte enabled or written in Unicode to handle languages with characters that require two or more bytes per character. Adapting layout for "bi-directional" reading audiences, because not all languages follow the layout of English. Languages such as Hebrew and Arabic, for example, are written predominantly right-to-left, whereas numbers are generally written from left-to-right. Internationalization is a complex engineering process, but hiring a professional internationalization consultant, such as AD-COM, is a good start and will save you time and effort. Request an internationalization audit–get the results that will help direct the successful development of your project.

Let AD-COM save you time and money by performing an internationalization assessment to determine your product's readiness for localization. We can even internationalize the product for you.

WHY INTERNATIONALIZE?

Internationalizing your product reduces your costs significantly AND increases the speed of the localization process. Many organizations still mistakenly believe that reducing the per-word cost of translation is the proper budgetary approach. However, streamlining methods through proper internationalization reduces costs AND maintains quality.